Who Said It: A Thinking Christian

‘I am a professor of Biology at an Australian University.’ I was brought up in a home which wasn’t strongly religious at all, but we went to the C. of E. in a sort of formal way....

‘I am a professor of Biology at an Australian University.’
I was brought up in a home which wasn’t strongly religious at all, but
we went to the C. of E. in a sort of formal way, and as an undergraduate I became
pretty actively involved in propagating things which I am now horrified at.
I don’t think I should have been set loose in Sunday Schools the way I
was. I had very dogmatic and strong views which I have since totally rejected.
I had a sort of literalistic belief in the Bible and the horrible view that
man was fundamentally a terrible sinner and Jesus came to save us from our sins—all
that sort of thing.

I was anti-evolutionist when I was an undergraduate. I used to strongly defend the literal
interpretation of the book of Genesis and I had a picture of God as the carpenter and He made the
world perfect and left it. He had virtually nothing to do but re-introduce himself back to perform
miracles.

I realised that I couldn’t defend my position at all intellectually
and I would have thrown out the baby with the bath-water, except that fortunately
for me in the Uni. of Adelaide, there was a very liberal group called the Student
Christian Movement. They were people who had been in much the same position,
but they had been searching for a more intellectual approach to religious questions.

You see if you take any of these biblical statements (in Genesis)
literally, they become nonsense. They have to be taken metaphorically. If it’s
worthwhile trying to interpret ‘God made man in His own image’ in
modern context (I’m not sure that it is, you know), but if it is worthwhile
trying to interpret it, I’d want to say that every single thing that is
made in the history of the cosmos is made, in some sense, in the image of God.
Man reflects that nature only more completely than a butterfly or moth.

I don’t conceive of God as having some plan of the future
which is gradually worked out across the ages. God to me is simply the potentialities
of possibilities in the universe. There’s not just one creator. All entities
are creators too, so that there is a multiplicity of creators. I think that
God provides the possibilities.’

This is who said it!

Charles Birch, professor of Biology at the University of Sydney
made those comments on ABC radio. It is a sad fact that he has influenced many
to adopt views similar to his own under the guise of being a ‘Christian
Thinker’. Birch illustrates very well the choice facing the student or
research scientist ‘Buckle under to peer pressure to believe in evolution
and put your faith in man’, or ‘Stand alone with your trust in God
as Creator.’ This is not a new choice. The writer of Proverbs wrote about
it when he warned students to ‘trust not in man’s understanding
but trust in the Lord with all your heart’ (Prov. 3:5-7).

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Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. We focus on providing answers to questions about the Bible—particularly the book of Genesis—regarding key issues such as creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.